Corporate sponsorship "is these days a cornerstone" of just about every major int'l event, and the Security and Exchange Commission's BHP decision might be watershed for them all, according to Malcolm Maiden of the SYDNEY MORNING HERALD. BHP "will certainly not be getting involved in a major event like the Beijing Olympics." More generally however, BHP's experience "might work against the trend in recent decades for major events to rely increasingly heavily on corporate sponsorship." The SEC "did not decide as it has in other cases that BHP used entertainment expenses to mask corrupt payments." Instead, it found that the Beijing Olympics program itself raised the risk that the U.S. anti-corruption act "might be breached." That methodology "puts all general corporate sponsorship and entertainment programmes in the gun, potentially." Multinational companies within the ambit of the anti-corruption regimes "need to not just ask themselves if they can handle risks that are raised by major corporate sponsorships, but whether they have systems in place that are capable of detecting the risks in the first place." Major-event planners "should also factor in the possibility that a golden age of corporate sponsorship and networking is drawing to a close: corporate sponsorships might have to be a less important part of major-event business cases in coming years" (SMH, 5/24).
